Rick Tapscott gave me some of my best opportunities

Few people had more impact on my career than Rick Tapscott, who died Sunday.

Rick hired me twice and by leaving the first time and agreeing to extra duties the second time, he really gave me three or four great opportunities. He lured me away from the Des Moines Register in 1985 with an offer to be assistant national/mid-America editor for the Kansas City Times. Then he left to join the Washington Post, giving me the opportunity to run a newsroom department for the first time in my career. Thirteen years later, he brought me back to the Register as religion editor (really a reporting role) and writing coach.

We became good friends, visiting in his homes Kansas City, Washington and Des Moines and our home in the Kansas City suburbs, socializing as couples and with our kids, who were about the same age. We shared with a couple other colleagues in season tickets to the Royals, going to the games together several times.

Barb Musfeldt, who later would become Rick’s wife, had been a colleague in my first hitch at the Register, an intern while she was working on her master’s degree at Iowa State University. Barb became a reporter at the Kansas City Star, which shared a newsroom and a rivalry with the Times.

But when news moved in 1985 that Gannett was buying the Register from the Cowles family, Rick overlooked the rivalry to ask Barb’s advice about who might be a good candidate to poach for an editing vacancy on his desk. Barb dropped my name, and I went down to Kansas City for an interview and then for a job.

Rick and I hit it off quickly, both personally and professionally. I was one of the first to know that his relationship with Barb had advanced from recruiting consultant to romance.

Rick wasn’t one of those editors who taught me a lot, not because he didn’t have a lot to teach, but because I was a veteran editor when he hired me as an editor and a veteran reporter when he hired me as a reporter. But he was an excellent model of level-headed leadership, brainstorming on stories and choosing your fights wisely (lessons I’d already learned but needed to relearn a few times).

Rick conferred with me when he was interviewing to become metro editor of the Register in 1998 after more than a decade at the Post. I encouraged him to take the job and was excited to have him back in the Midwest (I was at the Omaha World-Herald at the time).

Not long after he took the job, he was back on the phone, asking if I wanted to cover religion for the Register, replacing Bill Simbro, who had retired. I wasn’t that interested in covering religion, but I was very interested in working for Rick again (and in returning to the Register).

I had just started offering my services to newsrooms and journalism organizations as a visiting writing coach. I had asked my editors at the World-Herald if I could add writing coach duties there, but they had said no. I also had been rebuffed in an effort to become a columnist at the World-Herald. Rick agreed to my requests to be part-time writing coach at the Register and to write a weekly column on religion in addition to my religion duties. That accelerated the newsroom-training phase of my career.

When I was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999, Rick was wonderfully supportive to Mimi as well as to me as we dealt with that diagnosis and as I recovered from surgery. And he was understanding when I decided to stop my weekly commute to Des Moines and return full-time to Omaha, where my family had stayed.

We didn’t see much of each other after that, though we stayed in touch by occasional email. After moves to the East Coast, we were both back in Iowa in 2008, him as a journalism professor at Drake University, me as editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. He invited me to speak to a class once and we met in Des Moines at least a couple times for dinner and drinks.

I wish we’d been in touch more often, but it had been a few years since we’d seen each other. He couldn’t make it when I gathered with a few other friends when I was back in Des Moines this summer. A few weeks ago, I learned from a former Register colleague that he had been diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. Now I learned that he died this morning.

He was a great journalist and a great friend. I will always be indebted.

Rick and I were born and raised in Trenton, Mo. From infantcy through high school, we were classmates, teammates and best of friends. We graduated together and although we went our separate ways, remained in close contact over all these years. He and I spoke by phone just two weeks ago and he didn’t mention any health problems. I was deeply saddened to learn of his passing.

The Greatest uncle a man could ever have. Hunting, Fishing, and endless canoe expeditions in Norther Mn, when I was a kid. Hopefully I can live up to his legend and take a few kids on a journey of a life time too. Journalism may have been his profession but he possessed so much more humanity than I can imagine. By the way he was also the toughest guy I have ever know when it came to pain. I am eternally grateful to have him as an uncle and for my children to have known such a grate person. We all miss him greatly. Now is the time to heal and live up to what Rick would want us to do.

[…] days (I don’t think any top editors were involved in that one). One of my enduring memories of Rick Tapscott (who died recently and I remembered him in this blog) was him leading the sing-along at a party to […]

[…] in my first hitch at the World-Herald, did not prompt my move to the Des Moines Register in 1998. Rick Tapscott, who had hired me 13 years earlier for the Kansas City Times, had become the Register’s metro […]

about.me

Director of Student Media at LSU

I am the Director of Student Media for LSU. I have been an editor, reporter and writing coach for Digital First Media, TBD.com, seven community and metro newspapers. I spent three years doing research, teaching and writing for the American Press Institute. I have pursued my journalism career in 44 states, nine Canadian provinces, Ireland, Venezuela, Mexico, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Siberia, France and Italy.